Our subsidised food exports reduce others to starvation
Subsidised Irish milk powder is dumped below the cost of production in Jamaica, destroying the livelihoods of dairy farmers there.
Nomadic herdsmen in Namibia are robbed of their South African market by massively subsidised Irish beef, and Mozambique sugar growers cannot sell their produce to us because of EU restrictions.
If poor countries could increase their share of world trade by just 1%, 128 million people would be rescued from poverty.
If tariff barriers against poor country producers were lifted, they would benefit by 100 billion dollars per year twice as much as all the aid given by rich countries (according to Dr Brian Scott, executive director, Oxfam, Ireland).
So why isn't this allowed to happen? The capitalist system feeds on interest, which is met from profits, which in turn are derived from economic growth. This growth is like a balloon that can only expand or collapse the boom-and-bust scenario. In order to sustain growth in the West it is necessary to maintain recession in the Third World by interfering with free trade.
Growth increases profits, jobs, incomes, pollution, alcohol consumption, violence and health costs. The West will not reduce pollution because this would require a reduction in profits.
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. The EU is like a cancer growing on the landscape of Europe. It must expand or die.
The Irish people are not against enlargement of the EU, if it is fair. The Nice Treaty seeks to establish a political and military bureaucracy with "enhanced powers" that will ignore all reasonable restrictions on multinationals in their pursuit of profits. It would be able to ignore the genuine concerns of countries like Ireland. That is why it was rejected before.
If the Taoiseach thinks that the Irish electorate are "very intelligent" (RTE radio 8/9/02), why will he not respect their democratic decision to say 'no'?
John O'Hanlon,
22 Sandford Ave.,
Dublin 8.
